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Design and development of a smartphone based picosatellite (VELOX-PIV) communication and sensor system

Author

Tan, Ronney Kian Ming

Date of Issue

2016-05-17

School

School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Research Centre

Satellite Engineering Centre

Abstract

VELOX-PIV is the first students’ designed and developed smartphone Pico-satellite (PhoneSat) in Singapore. Smartphones possess great potential to allow for small, low-cost yet capable satellites for imagery or other space demonstration applications. In addition, the phone’s operating system enables developers to create customized applications using open source libraries to perform the required missions. Such low cost component and easy access development open up opportunities to academic or even citizen-space users.
The PhoneSat incorporates the use of a smartphone payload as an imaging, inertial measuring and post-processing device because of its suite of compact capabilities such as a 20-megapixel camera, Bluetooth connectivity and sensors such as the gyroscope and magnetometer for attitude determination.
Commercially-Of-The Shelf (COTS) components were compared, procured and thereafter, integrated together. A custom Android application was developed to utilize the functions of the smartphone to perform the required mission of the PhoneSat. A program is also written for the Arduino microprocessor to perform intra-satellite data handling on the On-Board Computer (OBC).
Thereafter, the intra-satellite communication was implemented between the OBC, Android Smartphone and RF Transceiver. Lastly, the Satellite to Ground Station communication was implemented by using 2 separate RF Transceivers spaced 1.5m apart in the laboratory.